Placing a classified ad in Craigslist is an efficient way to get SEO providers to contact you. You will find a range of responses from SEO providers. Some will compliment your site in different ways. Some will bash your site, spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), all with the intention to leverage what they are offering. A company that offers graphic design in addition to SEO will suggest that you need an overhaul of your site design to make it "modern". A company that offers web development services might suggest that on-page SEO is needed to make the HTML document structure friendly for SEO. A Content Management System specialist company might suggest that you convert your site to WordPress if it is not already so. This website is not powered by WordPress and will never be. One respondent even suggested that WordPress is superior for achieving SEO!

Select your SEO provider carefully. There are many out there. Consider many responses. Be aware of FUD and marketing tactics.

At first I became discouraged about my website due to some of the responses I received. Then as I received other responses, some of which said the opposite of earlier responses, I came to realize the tactics that were being exercised by SEO providers. Since I am building backlinks myself and have knowledge on SEO, I do have some appreciation for this area of endeavor which allows me to assess the integrity and quality of responses. I use Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer and have a couple thousand backlinks from various domains pointing back to various pages on my website. I use Google Analytics along with Facebook Insights to see which pages are visited the most and how long visitors stay on pages. This is good validation that the site content is being viewed, liked and shared. I can see from the statistics that my site is getting noticed in the search engines (particularly Google).

Whether you are doing your own SEO or commissioning an SEO provider (or both), you will want analytics and feedback capabilities for your site.

I click various SEO ads in Google (see stock) and Facebook (see valuation). Here is one SEO ad that I found extremely amusing. They offer a base SEO package for $1,500 with the top package selling for $50,000. Is the high price supposed to impress me into thinking they are a high quality SEO firm? I think that is just a marketing ploy to position their base package at a much more acceptable price (almost seems cheap in comparison). A quick investigation reveals that their company website has no Google PageRank and does not appear in top-100 of Google search results on search terms "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization".

If the SEO provider's website has no Google PageRank (PR), ask them why.

If a search on "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization" does not reveal the SEO company's website in top-100 of Google search results, ask them why.

I would think the best way to showcase their SEO prowess is to demonstrate it on their own website. You can be demanding and question top-10 and high PR.